It was the best of cons; it was the worst of cons

On Sunday night, just before the GoH speeches, someone noted that a bad storm was rolling in and that if any locals wanted to try to beat the storm home, they should probably head out immediately. I turned to jiawen and said, "There's going to be a tornado. They're going to have to evacuate us all to the parking garage. Because that's just how this con has been going."

I was wrong. However, Rachel's phone rang as Maureen was wrapping up her speech, and it turned out to be related to some of the early fallout from the "hey! fat people and trans people are inherently funny, and if I take pictures and post them to the internet, I'll be one of the cool kids!" debacle.

I dodged the norovirus or whatever the hell it was, knock on wood, but my roommate went down with it on Sunday. This was Vandana's very first WisCon. "Does this happen often?" she asked faintly on Sunday night. (Can you imagine a con that offered norovirus as a standard feature? I'm not sure who the hell would go to an annual PlagueCon. Not me.)

Aside from the stomach flu and the troll, it was a great con.

I saw a lot of the usual suspects but also met some really interesting new people. Tamora Pierce is truly awesome on panels -- funny, curmudgeonly, insightful, and intelligent. At the end of the YA Villains panel, she noted that fantasy fiction is one of the few places that concepts like Honor and Duty are discussed so bluntly and openly, and that is why teenagers like it so much; they are idealists, and they believe in honor, and they're hungry for people to talk to them about it. And then she added that it was an honor to be one of the people who got to deliver these stories to them. I got choked up when I would repeat this to my friends, in part because I was thinking of myself as a teenaged reader, and how true this was for me, though I couldn't have articulated that this was some of what I was looking for.

I also had a really interesting dinner out with a group that included my friend Tracy, a librarian named Hilarie, and author Betsy James; some of that conversation also revolved around what we were looking for as children when reading. Betsy loved the book The Children of Green Knowe as a child, in part because as a white child in Utah, she desperately longed for the sense of deep "my ancestors lived in this same place a thousand years ago" rooted-ness that the children in the story took for granted. I identified with the sense of reading to fulfill an unspoken longing, but I had different preoccupations. The one that came readily to mind was nuclear war; I spent a great deal of my childhood actively fearing a nuclear war, and I sought out post-apocalyptic novels like H.M. Hoover's This Time of Darkness because even when they were dystopic, they at least offered hope that the human race could go on. (Betsy noted that she also feared nuclear war as a child, but something I think boomers don't necessarily grasp about the generational difference here is that by the time I was learning about the nuclear threat, they'd quit doing duck-and-cover drills and instead bluntly told us that there was no point because nothing could save you from The Bomb. Which was true, but when you're six, there's something to be said for a comforting lie.)

The best of my panels was definitely the "Let's Make a World" one, in which the panelists and attendees embraced absurdism and came up with fire-breathing platypi, a planet with a molten chocolate core, octupus steeds, and 3.5 genders: spiky, fuzzy, scaly, and shiny. (Spikies and fuzzies contribute DNA; scalies gestate; and shinies, the half of a gender, offer DNA correction and are not strictly required but generally considered to be a good idea. Also, anyone can become a shiny, temporarily or permanently, although most of the time it's considered to be a phase.) And we came up with a plot and it even all made some sort of sense. The best thing was watching the ideas start to coalesce and fit together; that's one of the most exciting bits of creativity, when you've thrown in something earlier just because it was neat and then later you realize that it's useful in the story in a way you hadn't forseen at all when you put it in.

I chatted with interesting people and admired cool art at the art show and petted shiny things I can't afford in the Dealer's Room and bought some books, including Sarah Prineas's Magic Thief for Molly and Vandana Singh's Younguncle Comes to Town for Kiera. When Sarah signed the book, she wrote a little message in runes; there's an appendix in the back to let you translate. Molly was at one point obsessed with codes so she was immediately intrigued when I gave her the book this afternoon.

And I applied hand sanitizer. Repeatedly.